Why Is There Poverty?

[The following is excerpted from The Forest and The Trees: Sociology as Life, Practice, and Promise, rev. ed. For more information click here.]

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ollowing the course of major social problems such as poverty, drug abuse, violence, and oppression, it often seems that nothing works. Government programs come and go as political parties swing us back and forth between stock answers whose only effect seems to be who gets elected. If anything, the problems get worse, and people feel increasingly helpless and frustrated or, if the problems don’t affect them personally, often feel nothing much at all.

As a society, then, we are stuck, and we’ve been stuck for a long time. One reason we’re stuck is that the problems are huge and complex. But on a deeper level, we tend to think about them in ways that keep us from getting at their complexity in the first place. It is a basic tenet of sociological practice that to solve a social problem we have to begin by seeing it as social. Without this, we look in the wrong place for explanations and in the wrong direction for visions of change.

Consider, for example, poverty, which is arguably the most far-reaching, long-standing cause of chronic suffering there is. The magnitude of poverty is especially ironic in a country like the United States whose enormous wealth dwarfs that of entire continents. More than one out of every six people in the United States lives in poverty or near-poverty. For children, the rate is even higher. Even in the middle class there is a great deal of anxiety about the possibility of falling into poverty or something close to it – through divorce, for example, or simply being laid off as companies try to improve their competitive advantage, profit margins, and stock prices by transferring jobs overseas.

How can there be so much misery and insecurity in the midst of such abundance? If we look at the question sociologically, one of the first things we see is that poverty doesn’t exist all by itself. It is simply one end of an overall distribution of income and wealth in society as a whole. As such, poverty is both a structural aspect of the system and an ongoing consequence of how the system is organized and the paths of least resistance that shape how people participate in it.

The system we have for producing and distributing wealth is capitalist. It is organized in ways that allow a small elite to control most of the capital – factories, machinery, tools – used to produce wealth. This encourages the accumulation of wealth and income by the elite and regularly makes heroes of those who are most successful at it – such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates. It also leaves a relatively small portion of the total of income and wealth to be divided among the rest of the population. With a majority of the people competing over what’s left to them by the elite, it’s inevitable that a substantial number of people are going to wind up on the short end and living in poverty or with the fear of it much of the time. It’s like the game of musical chairs: since the game is set up with fewer chairs than there are people, someone has to wind up without a place to sit when the music stops.

In part, then, poverty exists because the economic system is organized in ways that encourage the accumulation of wealth at one end and creates conditions of scarcity that make poverty inevitable at the other. But the capitalist system generates poverty in other ways as well. In the drive for profit, for example, capitalism places a high value on competition and efficiency. This motivates companies and their managers to control costs by keeping wages as low as possible and replacing people with machines or replacing full-time workers with part-time workers. It makes it a rational choice to move jobs to regions or countries where labor is cheaper and workers are less likely to complain about poor working conditions, or where laws protecting the natural environment from industrial pollution or workers from injuries on the job are weak or unenforced. Capitalism also encourages owners to shut down factories and invest money elsewhere in enterprises that offer a higher rate of return.

These kinds of decisions are a normal consequence of how capitalism operates as a system, paths of least resistance that managers and investors are rewarded for following. But the decisions also have terrible effects on tens of millions of people and their families and communities. Even having a full-time job is no guarantee of a decent living, which is why so many families depend on the earnings of two or more adults just to make ends meet. All of this is made possible by the simple fact that in a capitalist system most people neither own nor control any means of producing a living without working for someone else.

To these social factors we can add others. A high divorce rate, for example, results in large numbers of single-parent families who have a hard time depending on a single adult for both childcare and a living income. The centuries-old legacy of racism in the United States continues to hobble millions of people through poor education, isolation in urban ghettos, prejudice, discrimination, and the disappearance of industrial jobs that, while requiring relatively little formal education, nonetheless once paid a decent wage. These were the jobs that enabled many generations of white European immigrants to climb out of poverty, but which are now unavailable to the masses of urban poor.

Clearly, patterns of widespread poverty are inevitable in an economic system that sets the terms for how wealth is produced and distributed. If we’re interested in doing something about poverty itself – if we want a society largely free of impoverished citizens – then we’ll have to do something about both the system people participate in and how they participate in it. But public debate about poverty and policies to deal with it focus almost entirely on the latter with almost nothing to say about the former. What generally passes for ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ approaches to poverty are, in fact, two variations on the same narrow theme of individualism.

A classic example of the conservative approach is Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground. Murray sees the world as a merry-go-round. The goal is to make sure that “everyone has a reasonably equal chance at the brass ring – or at least a reasonably equal chance to get on the merry-go-round.” He reviews thirty years of federal antipoverty programs and notes that they’ve generally failed. He concludes from this that since government programs haven’t worked, poverty must not be caused by social factors.

Instead, Murray argues, poverty is caused by failures of individual initiative and effort. People are poor because there’s something lacking in them, and changing them is therefore the only effective remedy. From this he suggests doing away with public solutions such as affirmative action, welfare, and income support systems, including “AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and the rest. It would leave the working-aged person with no recourse whatsoever except the job market, family members, friends, and public or private locally funded services.” The result, he believes, would “make it possible to get as far as one can go on one’s merit.” With the 1996 welfare reform act, the United States took a giant step in Murray’s direction by reaffirming its long-standing cultural commitment to individualistic thinking and the mass of confusion around alternatives to it.

The confusion lies in how we think about individuals and society, and about poverty as an individual condition and as a social problem. On the one hand, we can ask how individuals are sorted into different social class categories, what characteristics best predict who will get the best jobs and earn the most. If you want to get ahead, what’s your best strategy? Based on many people’s experience, the answers come fast and easy: work hard, get an education, never give up.

There is certainly a lot of truth in this advice, and it gets to the issue of how people choose to participate in the system as it is. Sociologically, however, it focuses on only one part of the equation by leaving out the system itself. In other words, it ignores the fact that social life is shaped both by the nature of systems and how people participate, by the forest and the trees. Changing how individuals participate may affect outcomes for some. As odd as this may seem, however, this has relatively little to do with the larger question of why widespread poverty exists at all as a social phenomenon.

Imagine for a moment that income is distributed according to the results of a footrace. All of the income in the United States for each year is put into a giant pool and we hold a race to determine who gets what. The fastest fifth of the population gets 48 percent of the income to divide up, the next fastest fifth splits 23 percent, the next fastest fifth gets 15 percent, the next fifth 10 percent, and the slowest fifth divides 4 percent. The result would be an unequal distribution of income, with each person in the fastest fifth getting nine times as much money as each person in the slowest fifth, which is what the actual distribution of income in the United States looks like.

If we look at the slowest fifth of the population and ask, “Why are they poor?” An obvious answer is, “They didn’t run as fast as everyone else, and if they ran faster, they’d do better.” This prompts us to ask why some people run faster than others, and to consider all kinds of answers from genetics to nutrition to motivation to having time to work out to being able to afford a personal trainer.

But to see why some fifth of the population must be poor no matter how fast people run, all we have to do is look at the system itself. It uses unbridled competition to determine not only who gets fancy cars and nice houses, but who gets to eat or has a place to live or access to health care. It distributes income and wealth in ways that promote increasing concentrations among those who already have the most. Given this, the people in this year’s bottom fifth might run faster next year and get someone else to take their place in the bottom fifth.

But there has to be a bottom fifth so long as the system is organized as it is. Learning to run faster may keep you or me out of poverty, but it won’t get rid of poverty itself. To do that, we have to change the system along with how people participate in it. Instead of splitting the ‘winnings’ into shares of 48 percent, 23 percent, 15 percent, 10 percent, and 4 percent, for example, we might divide them into shares of 24 percent, 22 percent, 20 percent, 18 percent, and 16 percent. There would still be inequality, but the fastest fifth would get only 1.5 times as much as the bottom instead of 12 times as much, and 1.2 times as much as the middle fifth rather than more than 3 times as much.

People can argue about whether chronic widespread poverty is morally acceptable or what an acceptable level of inequality might look like. But if we want to understand where poverty comes from, what makes it such a stubborn feature of social life, we have to begin with the simple sociological fact that patterns of inequality result as much from how social systems are organized as they do from how individuals participate in them. Focusing on one without the other simply won’t do it.

The focus on individuals is so entrenched, however, that even those who think they’re taking social factors into account usually aren’t. This is as true of Murray’s critics as it is of Murray himself. Perhaps Murray’s greatest single mistake is to misinterpret the failure of federal antipoverty programs. He assumes that federal programs actually target the social causes of poverty, which means that if they don’t work, social causes must not be the issue. But he’s simply got it wrong. Welfare and other antipoverty programs are ‘social’ only in the sense that they’re organized around the idea that social systems like government have a responsibility to do something about poverty. But antipoverty programs are not organized around a sociological understanding of how systems produce poverty in the first place. As a result, they focus almost entirely on changing individuals and not systems, and use the resources of government and other systems to make it happen.

If antipoverty programs have failed, it isn’t because the idea that poverty is socially caused is wrong. They’ve failed because policymakers who design them don’t understand what makes the cause of something ‘social.’ Or they understand it but are so trapped in individualistic thinking that they don’t act on it by targeting systems such as the economy for serious change.

The easiest way to see this is to look at the antipoverty programs themselves. They come in two main varieties. The first holds individuals responsible by assuming that financial success is solely a matter of individual qualifications and behavior. In other words, if you just run faster, you’ll finish the race ahead of people who are currently beating you, and then they’ll be poor instead of you. We get people to run faster by providing training and motivation. What we don’t do, however, is look at the rules of the race or question whether the basic necessities of life should be distributed through competition.

The result is that some people rise out of poverty by improving their competitive advantage, while others sink into it when their advantages no longer work and they get laid off or their company relocates to another country or gets swallowed up in a merger that boosts the stock price for shareholders and earns the CEO a salary that in 2005 averaged more than 262 times the average worker’s pay. But nothing is even said – much less done – about an economic system that allows a small elite to own and control most of the wealth and sets up the rest of the population to compete over what’s left.

And so, individuals rise and fall in the class system, and the stories of those who rise are offered as proof of what’s possible, and the stories of those who fall are offered as cautionary tales. The system itself, however, including the huge gap between the wealthy and everyone else and the steady proportion of people living in poverty, stays much the same.

A second type of program seems to assume that individuals aren’t to blame for their impoverished circumstances, because it reaches out with various kinds of direct aid that help people meet day-to-day needs. Welfare payments, food stamps, housing subsidies, and Medicaid all soften poverty’s impact, but they do little about the steady supply of people living in poverty. There’s nothing wrong with this in that it can alleviate a lot of suffering. But it shouldn’t be confused with solutions to poverty, no more than army field hospitals can stop wars.

In relation to poverty as a social problem, welfare and other such programs are like doctors who keep giving bleeding patients transfusions without repairing the wounds. In effect, Murray tells us that federal programs just throw good blood after bad. In a sense, he’s right, but not for the reasons he offers. Murray would merely substitute one ineffective individualistic solution for another. If we do as he suggests and throw people on their own, certainly some will find a way to run faster than they did before. But that won’t do anything about the ‘race’ or the overall patterns of inequality that result from using it as a way to organize one of the most important aspects of human life.

Liberals and conservatives are locked in a tug of war between two individualistic solutions to problems that are only partly about individuals. Both approaches rest on profound misunderstandings of what makes a problem like poverty ‘social.’ Neither is informed by a sense of how social life actually works as a dynamic relation between social systems and how people participate in those systems. This is also what traps them between blaming problems like poverty on individuals and blaming them on society. Solving social problems doesn’t require us to choose or blame one or the other. It does require us to see how the two combine to shape the terms of social life and how people actually live it.

Because social problems are more than an accumulation of individual woes, they can’t be solved through an accumulation of individual solutions. We must include social solutions that take into account how economic and other systems really work. We also have to identify the paths of least resistance that produce the same patterns and problems year after year. This means that capitalism can no longer occupy its near-sacred status that holds it immune from criticism. It may mean that capitalism is in some ways incompatible with a just society in which the excessive well-being of some does not require the misery of so many others. It won’t be easy to face up to such possibilities, but if we don’t, we will guarantee poverty its future and all the conflict and suffering that go with it.

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From The Forest and The Trees: Sociology as Life, Practice, and Promise, rev. ed. For more information click here.

55 Responses to "Why Is There Poverty?"

While your essay if well written and well argued, I failed to see any alternative offered to replace or at least to begin replacing/changing our current capitalist system. What alternative do you propose or prefer? What can be done?

I understood your article and its arguments. I am one of those people on food stamps, medicaid as my secondary insurance, fuel assistance, and my mortgage is subsidized. I have owned my own home for 10 years, raised 4 kids and work 6 days a week running my small business for 6 years now. I am a single Mother and without these programs my family would be homeless, cold and hungry. I am completely grateful for these programs and yes they have kept my family from suffering. It’s the prices of housing, food, insurance, taxes, gas etc. that make me poor. I live a very simple lifestyle and still cannot find a part time job to make ends meet. I am trying to run the American Dream Marathon. It’s just getting harder every year. I believe a great country is measured by how they take care of their poor or low income people. I wish I wasn’t on assistance but I am glad it’s there while I am in need of it. I live in a very wealthy area and my business is where Mitt Romney’s summer home is located in Wolfeboro, NH. I live with the elite and even cleaned the Marriots summer home for extra money last year.

It’s great that you’ve taken the hard work to help those out there who are seeking out resources within this area. Your serious dedication to getting the solution out there appears to be quite useful and has allowed college students much like me to come to their objectives. Please know that this work means a lot to all of us.

Your argument about capitalism has some weaknesses. You present Bill Gates and other industry leaders as if they came to a pre-set game already wealthy, and neglect the fact that they didn’t just grab the free chair–they built one. It’s not a zero-sum game. You disown your own 19th century version of competition as if it were an intolerable evil but fail to properly dismantle it. If you want to eliminate poverty, focus on education. People who are educated and have skills get the better paying jobs. A job is an exchange of value, and if you bring no value to the table, why should you get a job? We have a lot of people who don’t bring any value to the job market. We need to change that! It’s not in an esoteric approach to the evil system you don’t seem able to really label and describe. Learn, get skills, exchange them for payment in the free market. You don’t need to own anything or be an industry leader to be paid a higher value. After all, you write smart articles and books and people pay you for it…in the free market…

I don’t believe our economy is a zero-sum game. It’s actually worse than that. The pie gets bigger, but the upper classes take most of it for themselves because they own the corporations. Over the last several decades, worker productivity has increased substantially, but virtually all of that gain has gone not to workers, but to the top 1%. While elite incomes have soared, workers’ incomes have either been flat or gone down.

Education increases the competitive advantage of individuals but only so long as others don’t do the same thing. If everyone had a college degree, we would have millions of people with college degrees living in poverty. The availability of ‘better paying jobs’ isn’t even close to the size of the population in need of them.

The ‘free market’ has not existed for well over 100 years. It exists today primarily in the theories of university economists and others trying to defend against criticism of how capitalism actually works and what it does to millions of people’s lives.

When you say “worker productivity has increased substantially” you fail to realize why. It has nothing to do with the ability of the workers. It has been the advances in technology and the investment of the owners of the corporations and stock holders that has made the workers more productive. The elite have given the worker the opertunity and the tools.

Whatever the merits of the idea that workers have nothing to do with increased productivity (you might want to ask them about that), it is irrelevant to the outcome, which is produced by the nature of the capitalist system. In its current form, capitalism encourages the accumulation of wealth by an increasingly small (proportionately) and powerful elite which, of course, is thereby positioned to control the economic and political systems to its own advantage. This control includes having the resources to invest in productivity and thereby ‘enlarge the pie’ all the while keeping the increase for themselves. The consequence is a rapidly escalating disparity between the very wealthy and everyone else and a guarantee that some portion of ‘everyone else’ will not have enough to avoid living in or near poverty.

The argument is often made by defenders of modern capitalism that enlarging the pie is in fact the solution to poverty, but this has not and will not work for precisely the reasons that Bob describes in his comment.

You’re looking at it from a very capitalistic perspective, which is exactly one of the “individualistic solutions” Allan warned about. The elite do not “give” opportunities, they create additional opportunities for themselves and sometimes it might produce more jobs, and sometimes it might end in someone getting fired or replaced with a robot. When you see the rate of poverty and wealth disparity going up over the years, that means the net effect is that capitalism is not generating more opportunities.

The free market is almost instinctual to human nature and allows the economy to be incredibly adaptable. However, it is also very exploitive and does not intrinsically benefit society as a whole. Certain needs of society will never be met by the private sector. Sometimes, in order to benefit society and raise the baseline of prosperity, we need programs that are not profitable (at least not in the short term, or not in some monetary way). These include the building of infrastructure, ecological protection, public education, etc. In these situations, the government must be willing to step in and create programs that benefit the country and do so in an effective manner. Now, exactly what will benefit the country is a whole other argument.

I came upon this article with a leftist lean, but also suspicious of the effectiveness of “entitlement programs”. What I don’t like seeing is politicians that believe the country should do less, or do nothing. It’s like we’re purposely spending taxes to elect people that keep the government doing its job. This article has changed my opinions about how to approach the problem of poverty, it’s been a very enlightening read. Thank you, Allan.

Good point. I am certainly a proponent of getting a good education. However, where are the jobs that can bring in an average salary of $50,000 a year to support a family of three? We don’t have the job market to sustain a family of three. Unless the wife works part time for an additional $250 a week. Bringing the salary up to $63,000 a year. With the rise in food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, purchasing a car, gasoline, EDUCATION to rise above poverty, tell me how do you manage this.

I have an education. I have also had illness. This has prevented me from participating fully in the system. I’ve ‘fallen’ to the bottom fifth. Should I be valued as a lesser component of society to the point where my health suffers even more because I can’t afford a decent home or healthy food?

I cannot speak of your value as a lesser component in any way at all. If you are not healthy enough to work, we have a social safety net that exists to help you stay alive. Medicaid, SSDI, etc. If your point is that existing programs don’t pay enough for you to eat well and live in a clean safe home, then I agree with you. In a civilized society, I thknk humans have a moral obligation to care for those who are not able to care for themselves. However, I’m not relenting on the notion that an education is the key to offering the job market something of value and getting something in return. Society doesn’t “owe” anyone capable of working a meal or a job or a home. I realize that this is not a systems approach–I place a lot of responsibility on the individual, and I think it should be there. The professor didn’t debunk what I said earlier. Many who become self sufficient in this society didn’t steal a chair from someone; they built a chair and sat on it. They created; they innovated; they started something; they got some skills and offered them to someone who needed them.

Thank you! Your writing about those of us in poverty is both clearly articulated and profound.

I was raised in poverty and still am entrenched in its clutches at 45. This, despite a bachelor’s degree that I earned as a single parent that left me a mountain of debt I will owe the rest of my life.

Addressing both the health of the runner and the set up of the race is important. I have worked hard at overcoming personal issues that made me a poor runner. However, as you pointed out, there are only so many living wage jobs available, no matter how fast one can run. Knowing that someone else must starve so I can put food in my mouth leaves a bitter taste in the soul, and leaves all with starving spirits.

I work nine-hour days serving amazing humans challenged with developmental disabilities and can barely pay my rent.

In this system, I understand my profession has a negative income ratio. Given the capitalistic model we have, we are seen as bottom feeders, not producing a product to compete in the market place.

In the past during the Clinton years, I partipated in a welfare to work program. I was treated in a humiliating manner and led to believe my personal situation was created because there was something wrong with me. It led to further shaming and internalizing within myself that has taken me years to heal from.

Now I do have disciplined work habits, and give my all to the folks I serve everyday, and yet , am poorer than ever. My work is not valued in this social system. I get that loud and clear.

I only wish that I could rid myself of the internalized judgment about being poor. That presumed projection on the poor (that sadly we also inflict upon ourselves) that somehow we are poor because we are lazy, stupid and not as good as others.

For the system to go on as is, this shame is generated and continues to perpetuate generation after generation. This adds to the suffering of the poor in ways that can not be measured.

Thank you for using your voice to challenge the inequality of our current system, for truth-telling. Facing our individual flaws is a helpful exercise, as is facing the systematic flaws that we so blindly assume can not be changed. We must acknowledge all aspects of this issue if we are to be a strong nation of human beings retaining our companion as well as encouraging creative ingenuity in our market places. God Bless.

Trish please know that what you are doing, and the kind of person you are makes you a very rich person. It takes no skills to inherit money, but to value others takes enormous courage and self worth. You are obviously a very intelligent person and I am sure that if you had a lot less compassion and a broken moral compass you would probably have oodles of cash in the bank, but instead you have focused on what matters more and that is your soul, and other human beings lives. I too am money poor, and it is very difficult as it is a necessary tool, but I see the shallow and empty lives of those who have a lot of material wealth and have to remind myself that what I have gained no amount of money can buy.

I think that people don’t know how to use their money properly. I have been a garbage man most of my life–put 4 kids in college–own my 1800 square foot home have 3 cars and a motorcycle. Bills are paid every month on time–this was not always the case–education is the key not school– how to live within your means no matter what your income is. Yeah, so everybody wants to say but I don’t make enough–then spend less or make more–but I don’t know how–then ask–ask who–everybody thats who–but it easier to cry about it then do something about it–you create your own economy – YOU –

You own your own home? How much did you pay for it and when did you purchase it? You put 4 kids through college? When and how much was their tuition? Do you think a modern day garbage man can accomplish that or afford that? Do you have a pension? Most people don’t. It’s easy to say I did it then. Try doing it now.

Thank you Allan for this article, and thank you Trish for your reply. This has helped me be able to “keep on” and not feel as though I am a complete failure in America at age 59 (living in poverty, and have done everything I can and know to do to avoid it, but it’s just gotten worse, after going up and down for the past countless years now). It does me no good to beat myself and I just can’t do it anymore. I know I’m not “poor” inside myself, but outside I fight to not die.

There are plenty of folks out there that do their 8-7 and still living paycheck to paycheck. The problem is certainly not you, but how unfairly folks are valued for their hard work. Meanwhile, there are some that make hundreds of times more than us for doing practically nothing.

The world is certainly not fair, and equality is an illusion. But don’t let that affect your own sense of self-worth. We all contribute to the well-being of society even if we aren’t adequately compensated for it.

Oh, if only everything could be written about so objectively and keenly. I’ve lived in the middle spectrum and now the lower spectrum. If not for a very kind friend, I would have sunk even lower. I shudder to think of those in my position without that luxury. You are right, there simply must always be huge losers in order for there to be huge winners. At least everyone must acknowledge that.

This is a brilliant article, well explained. But really, even though it preaches using a wide view on the problem, I find it to still be limited. When you propose a redistribution of the wealth through the marathon idea, you seem to ignore the interests of all the ones who came in first. They fight real hard to get as much as they can, and in my opinion, they deserve what they can get (I’m not talking about overpaid puppet CEOs, I’m talking about hardworking brilliant people like Steve Jobs).

I came from poverty, my single mom has never had a lot of money, never owned a house or a nice car. She raised me comfortably in a very low income situation, and taught me to save money. I am lucky in that I managed to be a good kid, did good in school, always did my best to succeed, and now find myself with plenty of money, making more than she ever did, and I’m still quite young (and I’ve never been a ‘geek,’ just to clarify). I like the idea that I can rise from poverty, and make plenty of money, and I like the idea that my children, with luck and good morals on their side, can rise even higher. I like the idea that there is no limit to how much they can achieve. If we start limiting the top, I find that to be just as depressing as the poverty problem is. I feel like you always need one to have the other, and we just have to take the good with the bad.

We have to care for our friends and family when they are in need. And when we see people really screw things up, fall deep into debt, struggle to survive through their own bad luck and poor choices, we should pity them, try to make their suffering minimal, and wish them the best. They are the ones who are struggling now so that their children can have an unlimited future set out before them. That’s how the system is set up, and I’m not sure that the plight of the poor means that it’s broken.

The problem is that “wealth” equals “money.” The system is geared up to value it above all else, and favor those who prove best at generating and hoarding it. Because the system works so well in this respect it becomes self perpetuating. Make money make more money forever, for me. That’s it!

Those who say education is the key are right. They just need to be educated to understand that wealth creation is only half the equation. True wealth is having the wisdom to use the money to finance the positive evolution of the human race. Until we understand that this is the way forward and that it must be inclusive, not exclusive, poverty will continue to blight society. Unlimited financial wealth begets unlimited financial poverty. Until we can value true wealth in other than financial terms, the poor will always be with us. It would take a sea change of astonishing proportions to get us out of this rut. I’m not holding my breath!

Your article is incomplete. You forget to mention the active role rich people, their organizations and governments play in keeping most of us disjointed, unproductive outside of the time when we are guaranteed a wage. Think about how odd it is to sacrifice your time for hope. We have all been brain washed into accepting pleasure and entertainment as the sole purpose of our free time. From sex to food to fun to materialism. Americans have unknowingly traded in the desire for sovereignty for the desire to seek pleasure. We today more than ever before equate happiness with pleasure when happiness had always been the result of profound empowerment from profound sacrifice. From the 1st time mother to the championship athlete the greatest happiness iss the end result of empowerment NOT pleasure. To eliminate poverty we must bring back freedom of the individual to think and perceive and learn organically again instead of being spoon fed info from vested interests. The 1st step is to change and/or elaborate on the foundation of American philosophy.

Ben franklin was adamant that the constitution would only last so long as the people on the very bottom of society stayed moral. In order to return our collective consciousness to a more moral and less ego state we need to attack the the top of society because they are playing an active role in confusing and dividing us. Without unity poverty and all social ills will remain.

First we must take back contRol of media. We must spell out what exactly the press is because the 2nd amendment protects the press not the Murdoch type media empires we have today. We as a nation must ask ourselves a simple question: Can I trust this news paper? News station? Are they the entity the 2nd amendment was mentioning? Are they still just as commited to america as the 2nd amendment is to them?

I would answer no. Not when so much relevant news is ignored, censored or even worse manipulated for personal gain. Not when the NY Post decides that it is acceptable to dedicate the front page to the birth of a celebrities daughter for example. Not when there are more ads, gossip, rumors and sports then actual relevant news that can educate and reaffirm an American’s right to transparency. Not when mass human rights violations go unreported even on days when the newspaper is as thin as a takeout menu. Believe me. We need the press now more then ever. But we don’t have any.

The next profound change we must make is to change the words life, liberty and pursuit of happiness back to life, liberty and property as John locke trult intended. You have basically been fooled into thinking Life is about being happy when life is about being strong. Those who pursue property are seeking empowerment and sovreignty. Those who pursue happiness are actually sprinting towards suffering and slavery for lack of a better word.

The day we wake up and realize the very foundation of America is being attacked, capitalism and all the parasites of inequality will no longer have any host to survive within.

Well written, this is exaclty what people need to understand about capitalism. There can be a million times more philanthropists than those existing today, yet there would still remain poverty. Productivity has increased a hundredfold, so much so that there is enough food, clothing, and shelter for every human being on earth, yet poverty still remains. It is the inherent inadequacy of capitalism to provide social benefits that is the cause. And unless we get rid of capitalism, such inequality would continue. The good news is that capitalism is bound to perish, such income inequality, wealth accumulation and extraction of profits at a huge cost to the planet cannot continue indefinitely, the only thing we can hope for is that the transition is not a bloody revolution, but a peaceful one, the world history so far, though, point towards the former.

If capitalism is the problem:
1. Why are countries that do not have capitalism some of the poorest on earth?
2. Why are people dying, literally, to get to America?
3. Show me another form of motivation to work that actually been successful.
4. Why has America done more to support other countries and people than any other country in history?

That a system is deeply problematic doesn’t mean nothing good can come of it. I also would not describe capitalism as ‘the’ problem, since, for example, it is the creation of a much larger and older system of patriarchy.

That said, to your questions:

1. I don’t know what ‘noncapitalist’ countries you refer to—unless you mean non-industrialized, which is true of the most impoverished countries—since capitalism is global and the entire world participates in one way or another.

2. Most of the people who are risking their lives to get into the U.S. are from Mexico and farther south, in search of a living they cannot find in their own capitalist societies. This is especially true of migrants from rural Mexico, whose agricultural base has been destroyed by NAFTA and the resulting ability of government subsidized, large-scale U.S. agribusiness to undersell and thereby ruin Mexican small farmers and their communities.

3. For hundreds of thousands of years human beings have worked so that they could meet the material needs of themselves, their families, and their communities, for food, shelter, clothing, art, and whatever else it takes to sustain and enrich human life.

4. America is one of the least generous industrial societies in the world, when foreign aid is measured as a percentage of GDP. Interestingly enough, countries that contribute the largest share of their national income to help others tend to be those that are also more socialist in their practice of capitalism.

Such a smart article- and very poignant. It can be hard to understand the issue of Poverty in America if you are not personally suffering in it. If you’re like me and enjoyed this article, I think you’d enjoy this great interview with Linda Tirado who wrote “Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America” it was incredibly powerful!

The close-mindedness of people currently in power, and even the poor who defend how capitalism works goes to show that many people are simply not ready or, worse yet, not willing to change their habits, because it would mean that all or most of their current hard work may be lost. IF we started a new type of system.

The only thing I have found about many criminals that makes me jealous is how some criminals, like the very Notoriously Ifamous Pablo Escobar, spent some of his vast illegal wealth and helped Colombia more than any “Legal” charity does. When was the last time an “Honest businessman” built an entire housing complex for the homeless free of charge, and paid for and installed utilities in the apartments, or sponsored Sports (Soccer), tournaments with much of the money going to benefit the nation.
OF course he did a lot of bad things that greatly outweigh the good and his story is neither here nor there, but it makes me so upset that people will defend the CEOs who put others into starvation which leads to death eventually, all for “better market advantage,” meanwhile Poor people had come to rely on Drug dealers for social aid!!!! What the heck is going on???

If the current wealthy are such good and honest folks why do they not help others, oh lemme guess that would be the Commie way of doing things and we are not having any of that are we?

Open your mind to the possibility that altruism and charity are used by drug dealers in the same way they are used by the government and all religions. They are simply attempting to fool people by stealing their money and returning a small portion in the name of justice. The other issue with helping others is that often this help does more harm than good. It creates dependency and robs the recipient of the will to be self-reliant and personally responsible for their life. Eliminating the difference between childhood and adulthood benefits those with power most. By taking on the role of the parent they get to decide how to waste the money you earn while providing favors for their supporters.

Allan, thanks for writing an excellent article. The thought process across the globe needs to be lifted out of the hopeless perception that capitalism is the only practical way. Spreading the debate and hence the idea and hence the belief that options do exist seems like a good start. I hope it becomes more organised and disciplined.

A few good contributions on the subject are: Alternatives to Capitalism, by Erick and Robin; Of the people, By the People: The Case for a Participatory Economy, by Robin; Envisioning Real Utopias, by Eeick; and The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein.

I found this to be such a fantastic, interesting, necessary and thought provoking article. It’s about time we are “allowed” to question this so called sacred capitalistic system of ours. I do believe that we must have competition and greater rewards for greater performance or there would be no incentive to do great performances or strive to improve. The idea of capitalism and a free market was a good one and worked well at one time. The problem is simple greed and those percentages you mentioned. The top keeping obscene amounts for themselves and leaving so little for the rest. Even in the animal kingdom, this isn’t done. The strongest may get the best but they don’t continue to try and take it all, if they did, their species wouldn’t last long.

Health issues can also take you to the bottom in an instant and I guess that is just life but it would be welcoming to see more humanity in this country for sure. Yet even more than that, I think so many health issues are the most evil result of greed. Why are insects diseased, why is our food no longer food, why are water, soil and animals diseased, why do so many of our bodies not work like they are supposed to, why are mental health problems so rampant etc etc. I think almost every disease out there can be traced back to someone somewhere cutting corners or making careless decisions in the name of profit.

People behave the way they believe. Poor people who stay poor have poor thoughts and even unhealthy beliefs about wealth and the people who generate it. You can notice it by the comments posted on this site alone. Wealthy people have positive thoughts of wealth and the people who generate it. They also do not allow for excuses to stay in poverty or look for someone else to hand them a life preserver. While the poor person is preoccupied in his mind by how bad he has it and how good the wealthy have it, the wealthy are preoccupied with how they can get more because they have discovered that anyone can do it. You will NOT HEAR WOE IS ME SPEAK. Listen to the Law of Attraction teachings and you will see the real truth.

I always say, someone may give you a bus ticket, but no one is going to just hand out Bentley’s to you. If you want a Bentley, you are going to have to go and get it. Decide what you want and go after it, smartly.

This assumes that the solution to a systemic problem lies in the sum of individual solutions. It does not. We are living in an economic system that has allowed, for example, a small elite to appropriate virtually all of the increases in worker productivity while wages have remained stagnant. So long as the bottom 60 percent of the population must compete for just 25 percent of annual income, individual effort will affect who winds up living in poverty, not whether poverty and economic insecurity will continue as an outcome for a large segment of the population.

On the one hand your right. If you want to improve your circumstances you have to be willing to sacrifice and work hard or “smartly” as you put it. However, you also completely ignore the fact that resources are finite. Or, to use your analogy, Bentley can only physically produce a certain number of cars meaning, yes, anyone can do it. But not everyone can do it because the resources don’t exist to support that lifestyle for all regardless of work ethic or anything else. So, I found that gaping hole in your logic to be very revealing of a worldview which tragically (but unsurprisingly) is all to common among the privileged class. Basically, if their needs are met who cares about anyone else’s right? Unfortunately this is the self serving mantra of the super wealthy so they can watch children starve to death while they squander food and still be able to sleep at night.

Spot on! But remember that the arguments of the rich are not flawed, they are deliberately one eyed. It isn’t as if the error of their ways was pointed out, they would change. Others must die badly so that they can live well. It’s just more convenient to blame others for their misfortune than themselves for deliberately causing it. It was ever thus.

An excellent article Alan. I am currently reading and researching the vastly complex effects of capitalism that permeates every nook and cranny of society. I have just recently come across the work of Dr. Gabor Mate and his conclusions about how capitalism affects humanity from the biopsychosocial perspective. Everything from addiction, diseases, mental illnesses, child abuse, sexual abuse, and the list goes on.

The more aware of the capitalist system I have become, the more I see how insidious it is to most of the world and how much investment it has in keeping most people either blind, paralyzed, or protective.

[Note to Readers: This comment is in response to C. Pope’s comment, which is a few comments above. AJ]

From C. Pope: “While the poor person is preoccupied in his mind by how bad he has it and how good the wealthy have it, the wealthy are preoccupied with how they can get more because they have discovered that anyone can do it. You will NOT HEAR WOE IS ME SPEAK. Listen to the Law of Attraction teachings and you will see the real truth.”

Hear that poor people? You are poor because you have negative thoughts that make you poor. I’m guessing C. Pope, that you have never lived in poverty nor have you read the majority of comments posted here by people who have.

I’m sure it’s easy to think positive and look at capitalism within a positive light when its working well for you. I find nothing more repulsive than upper middle class snobs who fell for ‘the secret’ and now run around telling everyone about how the law of attraction is the reason they are poor.

Do me a favor, give away all your money and assets, cut ties with all of your wonderful family, friends, partners etc who have helped you get where you are (whether you realize it or not), then move to an urban ghetto in a large city where you know nobody and nobody knows you, then with only your positive thinking and your silly book build your life up to your current economic and social standing all over again in just a few short months. I’m sure with your incredible knowledge about the law of attraction this should be no trouble at all? In fact if what you say is the “real truth” then you could easily accomplish all that just to prove your point so why not do it?

Or you could continue living your comfortable upper-middle class lifestyle sipping non-fair trade starbucks, wearing clothing manufactured by child slave labor in India or china, and preaching the power of positive thinking to those living in the clutches of extreme poverty. Which ever sounds less hypocritical to you?

I think the popularity of the law of attraction book is a symptom of our collective denial. I think it really lacks compassion to reduce complex identities and social locations to wrong-thinking on the part of the individual.

I re-read this article searching hopelessly for how one dismantles this so-called system that has been “foisted” on all of us. And yet I don’t see it. How exactly professor will you encourage (or force) this small elite to give up what they accumulate and spread it around more? If more people educated themselves, there would be more opportunity for them to create wealth using their own resources and creativity–just as Gates and Jobs have done.

“All of this is made possible by the simple fact that in a capitalist system most people neither own nor control any means of producing a living without working for someone else.”

First, This statement is patently false when one consider the large number of independently owned small businesses in the USA. Second, there has never been a period in world history when people didn’t “work for someone else” capitalist system or not. If you don’t want to work for someone else, find something of value that you provide and offer it to the market and live on it, if and only if someone is willing to pay you for it. The world doesn’t exist to help you survive; you must struggle to do so. Not against rich people but against your own limitations, culture, or poverty mindset, or lack of education.

In 2014, just 6.6% of employed people in the U.S were self-employed, a figure that includes the owners of small businesses. This is a decline from 7.2% in 2006. So, the vast majority of people neither own nor control the means of production.

As for there never being a period in world history “when people did not work for someone else,” this is simply not true. In indigenous societies, for almost the entirety of human history, people worked together for the common good in communal economies. Which means that, in fact, the world—societies—did exist to help everyone survive. That was the purpose of economic systems before the advent of rigid, competitive, and oppressive class systems that are, over the span of hundreds of thousands of years of world history, a relatively recent phenomenon.

How will economic and political elites give up their dominance? That remains to be seen. One thing I believe is certain: the massive levels of inequality found globally and locally are not sustainable, either socially or ecologically. Whether by catastrophe or peacefully, the prevailing system will collapse sooner or later.

To which I would add the renter’s contribution in this case to the increased value of the house, in return for which their rent goes up, in the form of stagnant or decreased wages or shrinking pensions and health care coverage, or forced part-time status with no benefits at all.

Very interesting piece. We need some element of competition to encourage progress, but the system as it is is very flawed. I would pay a basic income to everyone to pay for the essentials of life, paid for by the government printing money. If too much money is created causing possible inflation, it can be taxed out of the system. If people want more, they can work for it. There are enough resources in our very automated world for everyone to have a good life. The problems with the present system are caused by excessive rent seeking (excarbated by fewer people being able to charge rent using their existing wealth to further advantage), and debt. The system as it is now excessively rewards a footballer, but under rewards someone doing vital nursing or social care, because everything has a “market value”

I would place the whole idea of progress at the heart of the problem, fueled by the Western worldview that makes time linear with everything oriented to the future and having more rather than enough. For a description of an alternative view, see Rupert Ross’s excellent books on restorative justice among Native Americans.

This is just an absolutely fantastic article, and I wish I could find something like this for every possible question life throws my way. Thank you, Allan, for a very well articulated publication with a very strong message.

I love how much emphasis and detail is in this article. I understand that yes, sometimes we ignore the structural causes of poverty. A person raised in poverty has 30 social elements working against him/her for every 3 chances they get. The sacrifice that has to be made still ends up costing them a lot of time to fully compete in “the game.” For example, the 40+ million people in the States with student loans totaling $1.4 trillion. Ultimately whether the system changes and policy makers end up understanding poverty from both a sociological as well as a systematic issue, you still have the issue of greed. The problem lies with the wealthy. Their attitude towards being wealthy and successful is still one of winner takes all and there is no fairness and equality when you are dealing with people’s lives. They flaunt and boast their gains when you have the majority living in anxiety. The wealthy have it too easy and everything in society supports their gains We don’t put enough pressure on them to redistribute their wealth in ways that are reasonable, i.e. employing more people at the expense of receiving a double bonus. Greed is the issue here and always has been.

It’s important to note that greed is not simply an attribute of individuals. It is also systemic, as you point out in your comment that “everything in society supports their gains.” Reducing the problem to the attitudes of individuals distracts from that ‘everything,’ which is the capitalist system that makes greed and excessive concentrations of wealth not only inevitable, but culturally valued and supported. This is not to say that the wealthy aren’t problematic in their relation to wealth and its defense, only that blaming them for capitalism misses the larger problem and winds up contributing to the continuation of the system.

Your use of the words fairness and equality are at the heart of the problem. Those words do not mean the same things to all people. Fairness is very subjective, especially for those with options that include better returns elsewhere. Equality should only refer to opportunity yet many still believe that it refers to a guaranteed outcome.